Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (13 page)

But Lawyer Wakem gets off, except for the thrashing. As I’ve said, it’s not a fairy tale.

I BEGAN BY
talking about debt as a story-of-my-life plot line, which is the approach Eric Berne takes in describing the variants of the life game of “Debtor.”

But debt also exists as a real game — an old English parlour game. In fact, it’s one of the games witnessed by the invisible Scrooge at his nephew’s Christmas party. By no accident on the part of Dickens — for everything Scrooge is shown by the spirits must have an application to his own wicked life — this game is “Forfeits.”

“Forfeits” has many variants, but here are the rules for perhaps the oldest and most complete form of it that we know about. The players sit in a circle, and one of them is selected to be the judge. Each player — including the judge — contributes a personal article. Behind the judge’s back, one of these articles is selected and held up. The following verse is recited:

Heavy, heavy hangs over thy head.
What shall I do to redeem thee?

The judge — not knowing whose article it is — names some stunt or other that the owner of the article then has to perform. Much merriment is had at the absurdities that follow.

The real-life models on which this game is based are two in number. First and more benignly, there’s the pawnshop, in which the heavy thing hanging over the head is a debt that must be paid in order for the object to be redeemed. But “to deem”— the root of “redeem”— means not only to name in the sense of conferring identity, but also to judge: this meaning of it is related to the verb “to doom.” And a forfeit means something lost through a crime or misdemeanour. So the second and more sinister model for the game of “Forfeits” is the condemning or dooming of a prisoner to death, and the heavy thing that hangs over the head is the executioner’s axe, and the thing to be redeemed is a life.

There’s nothing we human beings can imagine, including debt, that can’t be turned into a game — something done for entertainment. And, in reverse, there are no games, however frivolous, that cannot also be played very seriously, and sometimes very unpleasantly. You’ll know this yourself if you’ve ever played social bridge with a gang of white-haired ruthless ace-trumpers or watched any news items about cheerleaders’ mothers trying to assassinate their daughters’ rivals. Halfway between tiddlywinks and the Battle of Waterloo — between kids’ games and war games — fall hockey and football and their ilk, in which the fans shouting “Kill!” are only partly joking. But when the play turns nasty in dead earnest, the game becomes what Eric Berne calls a “hard game.” In hard games the stakes are high, the play is dirty, and the outcome may well be a puddle of gore on the floor.

It’s to the hard games of debtor and creditor that I would like to turn in the next chapter, which will cover vengeance, crime, penalties, macroeconomics, billion-dollar defaults, and debt-driven revolutions. It’s called, aptly enough, “The Shadow Side.”

( Four )
The Shadow Side

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE
thinking:
Haven’t you been shadowy enough already, what with all this talk about pawnshops of the soul, and sin-eating, and pacts with the Devil, and so forth? How much more shadowy can you get?
Quite a lot more, because it’s shadowiest just before it gets even shadowier. But never mind: I’m saving the hopeful stuff for the very end of this book. Just like Pandora.

The question I’ll try to address in this chapter is: What happens when people don’t pay their debts? Or can’t pay their debts? Or won’t pay their debts? What then? And, an extension of this question: What if the debt is one that by its very nature cannot be repaid with money?

I STARTED THINKING
about the subject of debt for a number of reasons, but among them was my puzzlement over a turn of phrase — one you don’t hear very often any more, although you still do hear it. “He’s paid his debt to society,” it used to be said. “Crime does not pay,” we also used to say, optimistically thinking this meant that crime does not ultimately reward the criminal; whereas it might mean instead — pessimistically — that Crime skips town and stiffs you for his bills, the rotten deadbeat.

In the lurid, trashy 1940s crime comics I read as a kid, crime
didn’t
pay. In these moral though gruesome narratives, the criminals committed many noir deeds, usually in the glare of a single unshaded light bulb or two cone-shaped car headlights, but they always got caught in the end. “The jig’s up,” someone would say, leading to more puzzlement for me — what was a jig? — was it an Irish dance, and if so, what did its being up or down signify? — or else they got splattered against a wall in a burst of red and yellow machine-gun fire, emitting cries of “Arrgh.” However, if arrested rather than terminated, they were made to pay in another sense of the term: they had to do something called “paying for their crimes.”

This phrase suggests a crime supermarket in which you can browse among the various crimes on offer and select those you want to do, take them to the checkout counter, render your cash or credit card — more for bigger crimes, less for smaller ones — and then merrily go out and commit them. The equivalent of this crime supermarket has actually existed in the past — the Catholic Church once sold indulgences, whereby you paid after completing the bad act, rather than before; and the same sort of thing is still available under various names — Hells Angels, the Mafia, and many another crime-for-hire enterprise. I’m told the terms are half down and half on delivery. But that isn’t what paying for your crimes is usually thought to mean.

Similarly, “paying your debt to society” didn’t often mean a fine. Instead it meant an execution or a jail term. Let’s ponder this in the light of everything we’ve said about the debtor and the creditor as joined-at-the-hip twins balanced on the two sides of a scale, with equilibrium arriving when all debts are paid. If the person being executed or jailed is the debtor who’s thought to owe something to somebody, and if that creditor is society, in what way does society benefit from the execution or the incarceration? It certainly doesn’t profit financially, since it costs a bundle to put people on trial and then lock them up, or cut off their heads, or disembowel them, or burn them at the stake, or electrify them so that smoke comes out of their ears, and so forth. So there must be some other kind of payment intended.

If we were still operating on a strict Mosaic eye-for-an-eye repayment scheme, there would be some sense to the execution part — that is, if the individual being executed had murdered someone. One dead body would result in another dead body, thus balancing the scales. But doing time in jail isn’t an obvious equivalent of anything — that’s why the jail-time verdicts for any given crime vary so widely from era to era and from place to place — and the material benefit to society is not only zero, it’s considerably less than zero, because it’s not the jailed criminal who’s actually paying for anything, it’s the taxpayer. And the two commonly heard justifications for locking people up — as a deterrent to other would-be crime committers, and as a way of accomplishing the moral improvement of the locked-up person — don’t appear to work out very well in money terms. Education is a better and cheaper deterrent, community service a better and cheaper moral improver.

Alas, the kind of payment actually meant by “paying for your crimes” really amounts to vengeance. So the debit side — the crime itself, and the ruination it may have caused to others — and the credit side — the self-righteous gloating, the feeling that the scum-bucket is getting a well-deserved comeuppance — can’t really be translated into cash equivalents at all. Similarly, some debts can never be money debts: they’re debts of honour. With these, it’s felt that other forms of payment must be exacted, and these other forms most often have to do with the infliction of nasty blunt- or sharp-implement procedures on other people’s bodies. “Hamlet, remember,” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but he doesn’t mean that Hamlet should go to Claudius and say, “So, you murdered my dad, that’ll be a thousand ducats.” He means that the accounts will not be balanced until Claudius is dead, not of old age but of revenge at the hand of Hamlet.

Revenge is a fascinating topic — fascinating to all those who have ever kicked their sibling under the table and received a harder kick in return, or who have thrown a snowball and received back a rock — and it’s one I’m sure you’re longing to hear about, with examples. For instance, the jilted girlfriend who snuck into her ex’s flat and cut heart-shaped holes in his expensive designer ties and smeared anchovy paste on his bedroom curtains; or the discarded boyfriend who had a dozen large black-ribboned funeral wreaths sent to his one-time lover, plus the bill for them; or, even worse, the fellow who called up the police and said there was a dead body in his ex’s house, but they were in denial over there and would pretend there wasn’t one, so the police would need a search warrant; or — far from such children’s games played in polite Canadian society — the mangled corpses that turn up on people’s doorsteps when there’s an old-time blood feud going on in a country where these rituals are still obligatory. Such things cannot be quantified — they’re evaluated subjectively, like art — so there’s no way of telling whether any given revenge item has in fact evened the scales. Revenge, therefore, can quickly turn into a long chain reaction of revenges, each one worse than the last.

But I’ll hold the revenge segment till later. Not only is revenge a dish best served cold, but it will take us on a shadowy Tunnel of Horrors ride into the darker and more bone-strewn corners of the human psyche; and such experiences ought to be left until the finale. First, we’ll go on a relatively jolly tour of the lighter suburbs of Shadowland: that is, the various consequences that can flow from the nonpayment of debts that are strictly financial in nature.

WHAT HAPPENS IF
you owe a legitimate money debt and you don’t pay it? This can overlap with “can’t pay” or “won’t pay,” as in the expression French parents use with their children: “Tu ne peux pas, ou tu ne veux pas?”
You can’t, or you won’t?
Whichever it is, different societies have instituted numerous hammers and tongs and kicks and torments to make the debtor cough up: for without her sword, or at least the wherewithal to give you a hefty slap on the wrist, the Goddess of Justice is powerless.

In the past there have been many severe penalties for nonpayment, from debt slavery to seizure of assets. In England, from the seventeenth century until the early nineteenth, your creditor could have you arrested and accused of concealing your wealth, and then have you thrown into an overcrowded, dank, and filthy debtors’ prison, where you had to languish either until you paid up or until someone bailed you out by paying up for you. While in there, you had to cover the costs of your own food and lodging — a cruel twist, considering that you’d been incarcerated for not having any money in the first place. So unless someone came to your rescue, you were likely to starve and freeze to death. The redoubtable eighteenth-century writer Doctor Samuel Johnson had this to say about debtors’ prisons:

It is vain to continue an institution which experience shows to be ineffectual. We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We have now learned, that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit: let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it. . . . Those who made the laws have apparently supposed, that every deficiency of payment is a crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust. It seldom happens that any man imprisons another but for debts which he suffered to be contracted in hope of advantage to himself, and for bargains in which proportioned his own profit to his own opinion of the hazard: and there is no reason, why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred.

In other words, both the borrower and the lender were to blame if their arrangement didn’t work out: the former for endangering his security by borrowing, the latter for seeking to make a profit — assumed to be an excessive profit — from the desperation or the excessive risk-taking of the borrower. Their contract had been entered into out of self-interest on both sides, and the bad judgement and greediness of both were therefore to blame for its failure. It is more than possible that Dr. Johnson took such a lenient view of imprisoned debtors because he’d come so very close to being one himself.

It was often the case that the English debtor’s family moved into the prison with him, and the wife and children went out to work in order to pay for the whole family’s room and board. This is fairly close to the Code of Hammurabi of four thousand years before, whereby you could sell your wife and kids to pay off your debts. It‘s also fairly close to the bonded child labourers in India today, estimated by Human Rights Watch to be fifteen million in number, who work long, hard hours to pay off debts incurred by their parents — parents who often have no other way of trying to pay back the money. But in nineteenth-century England, the word for this kind of child-and-family labour was not “slavery.” That word was reserved for another form of slavery, whereby somebody claimed to own another person completely. Yet the child debt labourers were, and are, just as unfree.

Charles Dickens’s father was thrown into the Marshal-sea debtors’ prison, and the twelve-year-old Charles was pulled out of school and sent to work in a blacking factory — a despair-filled experience that darkened his whole life and came back in dreams to haunt him. Nonchalant wastrels, charming bankrupts, no-good scroungers, and despairing debt prisoners occur throughout his work, and the Scroogy side of Scrooge’s nature comes from Dickens himself — he was openly generous in many ways but also very tight with a penny, so afraid was he of following in the footsteps of his improvident father.

Dickens’s best-known fictional bankrupt is Mr. Micawber, from
David Copperfield
— said to be modelled on Dickens Senior — who’s always waiting for “something to turn up,” but who, when it does turn up, spends it on drink. Micawber’s recipe for happiness is often quoted. When young David goes to visit him in the debtors’ prison, he cries a lot, and then, says David, “He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable.” This is said to have been a direct quote from Dickens Senior.

However, the remainder of Mr. Micawber’s moralizing-speech paragraph is
not
often quoted: “After which he borrowed a shilling of me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up.” Micawber is a man who’s painted himself into a corner with no way out of it that he can see, and so he simply enjoys the corner. Many of the debtors Dickens portrays are conscious of their humiliation and disgrace, but not Mr. Micawber. The old blues song “Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me” could have been sung by him. He even mooches off other debtors, so shameless a character is he. He’s far from being honest and responsible and conscientious, and he’s a great humbug — his tears are mostly acting; but the reader half admires him for his jaunty ability to shrug off his burdens, and so, in a way, does Dickens. At least Mr. Micawber is not malicious. He means no harm, although he causes it.

Debtors’ prisons were largely an Old World phenomenon. Urban overcrowding there made labour cheap, but in early and rapidly developing North America there was such a demand for able-bodied workers that keeping people in jail because they hadn’t paid their bills made no economic sense at all. Instead, such debtors were forced to become indentured labourers — workers bound to serve a specified employer until the debt was paid off. “Community service” is the closest thing to this now, though it’s not often used as a substitute for nonpayment of debt. In Western societies, we do still jail people for not paying up, most often in cases of failure to provide child support; even so, the charge is likely to be contempt of court. It’s punishment for a perceived attitude —“You won’t pay”— rather than lack of funds —“You can’t pay.”

Apart from that, the things that can happen to you in North America nowadays if you don’t pay your debts are so non-life-threatening as to make little impression on the extravagant borrower. I’m told that university students tell tales about their ballooning student loans with rueful grins rather than with floods of despairing tears. Everyone’s in debt — so what? That’s the way it is, and how else are they supposed to get through school? As for paying it all off, they’ll think about that later.

A friend of mine — this was back in the 1970s — was on the receiving end of one of those injudicious mailings that the newly born credit card companies went in for in those days. They’d send you a card in the mail, no questions asked, and they sent my friend one, and he quickly spent the limit. There followed a lively game of “Try and Collect.” He’d pay a small amount every month — five dollars and thirty-two cents, or some paltry and annoying sum like that. And the credit card company did become annoyed, and turned the account over to a collections agency. Then my friend started getting tirades over the phone. This was back in the days before the invention of the little window that showed you who was calling.